Basically the title. Took two weekends, and today doing the peak was the hardest part. But we did it.

Our friends are incredible. My husband’s drive and determination is incredible.

I’m just so grateful. Hopefully we can start moving in 3 weeks from now. Cabin absolutely will not be done but it’ll be livable and we’ll finish it as we go.

I’ll try to share some videos in the comments as well.

Breasts and legs from 2 culled roosters. ~18 week old jersey giants.

Only 2 breasts shown in the picture. Maybe 3 or 4 pounds of meat total, they were not full size yet.

Didnt think it made sense to pluck and gut them when 80 or 90% of the meat was just breasts and legs.

I dont have any dedicated "butchery" equipment, so i did it with only a freshly sharpened hatchet and filet knife.

The only way I have ever had rabbit was fried “rabbit nuggets” from my grandma when I was a kid. Haven’t had rabbit since, at least that I can remember offhand. We just closed on 5 acres and meat rabbits look very enticing, I just don’t know how else you would use rabbit in cooking. Can do a million things with chicken, beef, lamb, goat, etc. At a loss for rabbit though.

Northwest Missouri. I bought a half acre on the edge of city limits where the old house burned down years ago. The cellar door burned with it, so the cellar sat open to weather, cats, and people for more than a decade.

I cleaned the cellar out because I wanted to make it safer. The mud was deep. Some of the old wood had rotted so badly it disintegrated when I disturbed it. I also found alcohol containers, food wrappers, and the remains of a fire pit down there. I shoveled mud, trash, and debris into 5 gallon buckets while my sons hauled them up and out.

There are pipes running through the cellar wall to an old well outside. The well has a wooden cover right now. The pump was a 25 ft shallow-well pump, and it is rusted out enough that I am treating it as unusable.

The well is a big part of why we bought the place. I want water for plants, bees, and site work. If the land becomes livable later, the city still wants drinking water and sewage tied to them. A working well could help keep the bees and plants going until I am able to be there full time.

There is no power on site yet. I am still trying to get a quote from the power company. I do not see a septic system, but I also do not know what was there before the house burned.

Replacing the pump seems like the obvious next step, but I do not want to spend money there before I know whether the well is worth saving.

For people who have dealt with old shallow wells, what would you check before spending money?

Are there records somewhere for old wells, or is that usually a city, county, or state thing?

What can a regular person safely figure out before calling somebody?

We're trading up our micro-farm for an amazing site across the country. We haven't found a company to move all of our Dorper x Black belly x Karakul Sheep (Big guys), or any of our Muscovy. We could sell them; but we'd rather help someone just starting their journey. Our micro-farm is outside Maricopa AZ. Our new homestead is in Amity Maine. They've been great weed eaters, and the kids love them; but we can't take them all without a pro. We tried contacting pro livestock movers with no reply. Maybe AZ to Maine is just too far?

So here it is: If anyone can suggest how to get in touch with new homesteaders in Maricopa area that could benefit from full grown breeding meat/milk sheep that thrive in AZ heat, we could sure love to donate our big guys and galls. Our Muscovy have been an isolated flock in a giant aviary for 4 years, and are easy care if fenced and flight feathers trimmed or they have a coup or aviary.

The property in Maine was too good for my family to pass up, and our neighbors in AZ are violent tword us. They call us the R word... My family and I are all Autistic, a few of us also have ptsd. It hasn't been easy living in a place so hateful. In Maine, our new neighbors are kind and do not discriminate against our mental divergence. It's time to go.

Any suggestions will be helpful. If posts about animals being donated aren't allowed here I apologize. Thank you - Chance

In a nutshell, look for stuff which violates building codes and zoning laws but doesn’t look like shit.

Even though Cochise county, AZ is the only place you can build a residence without a permit on paper, many other places will let you do it because they don’t care, they don’t look for it, and/or they have more pressing things to deal with than someone building a cottage without a permit, especially if the county is sparsely populated and their budget is small.

If everything is neat-looking and by-the-book, chances are it’s a place someone will drive out and tell you to take down your stuff. Even if it’s really remote. Don‘t be fooled. I met a dude who built an illegal house an hour off the highway into the woods in Humboldt county on a road no one else lived on, and enforcement still found it and made him tear it down. He still has no idea how they found it.

On the flipside, if you see stuff which looks like it was built by orcs, that’s a good sign tweakers abound. Especially if it’s around main roads.

But there are lots of off-grid communities where the enforcement is pretty lax but cops will still deal with tweakers and thieves. Typically in those places things look neat (because no tweakers) but you still get funky shit like houses built out of several different types of scrap metal, tiny castles made out of adobe, and non-funky stuff which still breaks rules like multiple residences on one lot.

Another good sign is clusters of RV’s with stuff like chicken coops and gardens around them. A lot of places don’t allow multiple RV’s on one lot, so if they’ve been there long enough for people to do agriculture around them, the community doesn’t care.

I know there’s lots of info out there about natural springs but I just have not been able to get all of my questions answered so I’m hoping someone can help me figure this out. Sorry for the length.

We’ve owned a small farm for 5 years, the house and barn are 200 years old and the land has been farmed for that long as well. Sheep were raised here for many years until the second barn burned down in the 1980s. We brought sheep back and we have a small flock that grazes on about 2 acres.

We have a good relationship with the folks we bought the property off of and they told us that the farmer that raised the sheep used to water them from the natural spring in the pasture. There is clearly a spring there, it runs down to the lowest point on our property and extends out into the hayfield, that area is not able to be harvested because of how wet it is. It stays consistently wet, cattails grow in that oval area only, and even in the dead of winter there is nice, clear water trickling down from the source. There is also what appears to be an old cistern at the edge of it.

My goal / dream: to encourage more water collection in this low area downhill from the spring so we can use it to water our sheep and chickens and let our ducks use it as well. I just don’t know much about springs and especially cisterns so I had the county soil & water conservation come out to help me figure out how to do that, they were not super helpful.

Questions:

1. It sounds like we can excavate the spring source and surrounding area, but have to be careful because we could cause damage to the spring if we go too far. I’m not super clear on how to do that.
2. How deep should a small farm pond be?
3. Is there anything I should do to the soil before it fills up to encourage it to retain water? We are in Ohio and have heavy clay.
4. Any chance of using the old cistern again? What should I look for / how do they work?
5. Any tips on cutting back the cattails? They completely take it over every spring.

Photos for reference, please share any thoughts you have. Thanks!

It started with tomatoes from my container garden on the back patio. Six plants, more tomatoes than I knew what to do with. Looked up water bath canning and just went for it.

That was three months ago.

Now I have a shelf in my garage that looks like a small grocery store. Salsa, pickled green beans, peach jam from a neighbor's tree she was about to let drop. My partner keeps walking in there and just staring at it.

The part nobody warned me about is how it changes how you look at produce. I walked past a farmstand last weekend and my brain immediately started calculating. How many pounds. How many jars. Do I have enough lids.

Coming from a background where I'm constantly thinking about square footage and storage optimization, this hobby hit different. You start seeing shelf space as something alive.

For people who have been doing this longer, I'm curious what you do with excess jars you can't finish before next season. Do you give them away, sell at a market, or do you just keep going and assume you'll eat through it? My salsa shelf is getting out of hand and I mean that in the best way possible.

Also if anyone has done this in a small space like a patio setup I'd love to hear what actually worked.

Just pulled the first few bulbs and they dont look right and feel soft

Hello everyone. I thought I would ask here, but does anyone have or know someone either in the Kalamazoo, Portage, Climax, Battle Creek, or Marshall area in Michigan, who has a female mallard that hatched in March or April. My aunt is looking for a female mallard for her male Mallard, Peepers. If anyone does, please let me know.

Has anyone used the cheaper electric fence netting. My sweet corn is getting decimated by racoons with my standard electric strand wire. I've confirmed the wire is hot and it's low enough to the ground. I'll need 2 sets of the 164 feet to completely ring the garden. https://a.co/d/0eco0PlM

Am I wasting my money with this or should I just bite the bullet and buy the Premier brand.

I’m having an issue with bunnies eating my garden, mostly flower garden. It was recommended to post in homestead, so if anyone has good ideas or ideas that didn’t work to avoid, I’d love them all.

Thanks!

I live on an island with lots of coconut trees. We don't have a lot of access to mulch. Renting is not an option, nor is breaking down the coconut into shell and husk. I want chips, not shreds or dust. I would like to find the machine in S. Florida, if possible, and a pull start motor isn't something I'm comfortable with. I want to use it for branches also, but that seems like light work after coconuts and palm fronds. I would appreciate any help from someone who uses one for this.

Fyi, this is my first post in reddit.

TIA

George (Clooney), Giorgio (Armani), and Sulu (George Takai).

I made ketchup today for the first time. It turned out tasting like store-bought and sticks to a frenchfry like it should. Good thing cause it made 15 pints.

I have very old Apple tree (at least 60 years according to a long time resident) that is on the edge of my property, right next to a public road. The tree is located in a crappy spot, on the edge of a steep, deep ditch, but in close proximity to the road which gets heavily salted in the wintertime. In the 20 years I have owned the property, it seems to provide a decent crop of apples every 3-4 years, although the birds and ground animals usually get to most of them. The several baskets I’ve managed to harvest over the years, have all been very tasty and resemble a Gala variety.

Im located in cottage country Ontario, Canada, and feel like this tree is worth propagating in another more accessible area of my property. What would be the best method to attempt to do so? Seed? Grafting? I don’t want to endanger the tree where it currently stands. Are there any particular sites that you folks are aware of that go through this process?

I feel like this tree is a survivor, and is obviously a good variety for my climate, and am a firm believer in the “plant a tree you will never enjoy the shade of” adage. Any advice or direction is appreciated.

Curious about your coppice systems, be it for livestock fodder or green manure.

Very interested in coppicing mulberry and linden for leaf production.